Is It Israel or Iran That Poses A Nuclear Weapons Risk?

Scott McConnell, writing in The American Conservative, offers a most interesting commentary.

I’m going become a pest and a bore about linking the Iranian nuclear issue to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Obviously the two are connected, strategically, psychologically, and morally. But we have this weird Emperor’s New Clothes thing going in America. We are supposed to be very agitated about Iran’s quest for (what seems to me) the ability to construct a nuclear weapon in a pinch, while ignoring Israel’s very large and menacing actually existing arsenal. American policy is to support an Israeli nuclear monopoly in the Mideast. But when did it become so, and how? I don’t remember any debate about it. Perhaps it was decided by the very smart people, and subsequently there was no need for further debate.

But guess what. The discussion has started. It just hasn’t reached these shores yet. Here is Jack Straw (Britain’s foreign minister under the Blair government) talking on BBC radio a few days before the Iranian election: